


lay my head on the hood of your car

by arbitrarily



Category: New Girl
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-29
Updated: 2012-12-29
Packaged: 2017-11-22 20:15:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/613864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jess moves on. And gets it on with her roommate. Normal stuff. Nothing to see here. <i>Written Oct 2011.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	lay my head on the hood of your car

**Author's Note:**

> This was written in October 2011, so needless to say, this diverges from canon during 1x03.

You know how this story goes:  
  
Girl gets dumped by Boy (and/or catches Boy cheating on her with Other Girl) and moves in with Three Other Boys and then randomly starts doing Stuff You See On Skinemax (And/Or In Internet Porn) with one of the aforementioned Three Other Boys whilst insisting This Is Not Serious, only it sort of does get Serious, & Fast.   
  
Consider this a general outline of The Super Dumb Things Jess Does In The Post-Spencer Era.   
  
And the first in the long line of Super Dumb Things Jess Does In The Post-Spencer Era  _definitely_  includes that one time she agreed to be Nick’s fake girlfriend and escort him to a wedding.  
  
Scratch the word escort.  
  
That makes her sound like A Lady You Pay To Do It With.  
  
Actually the first would probably just be called Moving In With Three Dudes She Met Off Of Craigslist, but that’s, like, a totally foregone conclusion.  
  
Anyway.  
  
We’re going to say this starts at a wedding.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
This starts at a wedding.  
  
At this point in time, Nick has already gone off-book (read: abandoned his Fake Girlfriend for his Ex-Girlfriend), and Winston and Schmidt have made it clear that Jess needs to Put A Stop To This, so yeah! That’s what she’s going to do!  
  
Jess strides over there, gait awkward and she stops in front of the two of them and braces her fists on her hips, arms akimbo, and then drawls, “Nicholaaaaas.”  
  
“ _Little_  busy right now here, Jess. Little busy.”  
  
She’s about to just shrug and walk away, like, whatever, but Schmidt’s right there with Winston and Winston crosses his arms over his chest and shakes his head all super serious-like, and Schimdt waves a finger at her, first all  _no-no_ , and then all,  _turn-around-bright-eyes_.   
  
“Yeahhhhh,” she says then, and cocks her head to the left. “Nick? Can I . . . ? See you. For a moment.”  
  
Nick doesn’t move, so she lunges forward, the spandex of those stupid, stupid bike shorts biting into her thighs as she moves and what she really wants to do is a) find a bathroom and strip these stupid, stupid shorts off and just go wild and native and free like that documentary Schmidt was drooling over on National Geographic the other day, b) snake her hand into his front pocket and fish out those fake hillbilly teeth he made her spit out because she is 87% sure that those teeth would make this entire situation eight times more entertaining, and c) smash her mouth against his mouth, but, like, she’s not really sure where this third impulse is coming from. So like the shorts and like the teeth, she’s just going to let that slide.   
  
The alternative is just too . . . weird. Even for her.  
  
Instead she grabs him by the lapels and kinda shakes him a little and does the Serious Eyes (that also double as the Crazy Eyes, or at least Coach told her that, and Nick and Schmidt had agreed, but that was a long time ago, like three weeks ago, so maybe the Crazy has been diluted in favor of the Serious, or something like that in her favor).  
  
“Listen to me,” she says all gruff. Winston had been watching  _Gran Torino_  a few days before and she was aiming for that Clint Eastwood-style, get-off-my-lawn gravel voice, but she just sounds like a petulant teenager with a cold.  
  
“Nah, nah, you listen, Jess. I am fine. I am cool. I am copacetic. I got Caroline over there grabbing us a couple alcoholic beverages and everything is fine and nothing of your concern.”  
  
“You don’t even know my concerns, friend,” she says, because he doesn’t. The bike shorts are at the top of the Concern List, and she guesses, followed by him, and whatever downward spiral he’s tiptoeing ever closer to, but there’s also the hillbilly teeth and digging out her rock collection for class on Monday and probably these bike shorts again for good measure because they really are really tight.  
  
“Exactly,” he says, and then he grabs her by both shoulders, sort of shakes her, and walks away with a nod.  
  
“That doesn’t even make sense!” she calls after him.  
  
The next time she sees him, he’s taken over the photo booth and is weeping into a bottle of Jack Daniels.   
  
That should totally be a turn-off. No one wants to bone a sad man.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
When they get back at the apartment after the wedding, Schmidt is already holed up with Gretchen (“We are all sleeping with headphones on tonight, am I right?” Winston said before shutting the door to the big room) and Nick keeps rubbing at his eyes with his fists as though that alone will somehow make him less drunk. They’re both hovering in the hall, just outside her bedroom door, and also just outside the bathroom door, and Jess pauses to kick off her heels.  
  
“You are going to be mondo hungover tomorrow morning, Fake Boyfriend,” she says to him, and he scowls a little, but he also nods, his eyes already bloodshot.   
  
Maybe she does have a thing for sad men, because next thing she knows, she’s adopted a British accent and is all “pip, pip cheerio! Fare thee well, fake beau of mine!” She goes to give him a light, chaste kiss on the cheek (scratchy, not at all like a pillow, that was a lie) because life is hard and his night was hard, but he, like, turns his face at that exact moment and her mouth hits the corner of his. And then -- he says her name. He says, “Jess,” the way they do in all those serious BBC period piece dramas, only without the British accent but just as serious and just as out-of-breathy like he’s the one wearing a corset or whatever. He says her name and then he has his hand buried in her hair at the nape of her neck and he smells like Jack Daniels and like good dude cologne and, like, skin (does skin even have a scent? because his does) and he’s  _kissing_  her. Like, actively kissing her and not Like Friends Do, or like when you kiss your old Uncle Lester at a family gathering all light on the cheek because his cheek wrinkles and splotches make you sad and nervous about old people. He’s kissing her hard, like he wants to knock her teeth out, or eat her mouth, or both. Nick’s sort of a violent dude when it comes to the lip and teeth region, and she really had not estimated that about him.  
  
His mouth tastes kinda rank -- like a Long Island Iced Tea that’s sat out in the sun for three days or something -- but the fact she even knows what his mouth tastes like is just crazy nutsy cuckoo. But he’s still kissing her, and she’s, like, kissing him back! And he’s got her face in both his hands and his body is pressed right against hers and she doesn’t know what to do with her own hands. Where do people put their hands?!?! Where do people put their hands when they’re making out with their roommate?!?!   
  
But then, suddenly, it’s kinda like it doesn’t matter where she is supposed to put her hands or what she is supposed to be doing, and she’s just kinda pawing at his chest and that . . . vest of his, and her hands are wedged between their bodies and he’s  _still_  kissing her, and his mouth is sloppy and sorta earnest against hers, and yeah, it’s Nick, it’s Mr. Suspenders (shut up, she can call him that in her head if she wants to!), but there is something just bonkers erotic about this whole thing.  
  
Erotic is a word people use for stuff like this, right? Like, this is what Cece was always blabbing on about when Jess would call her up and be all, “so, Spencer, right,” and Cece would be all, “ _eroticism!_ ” or whatever. Because if this is what erotic feels like, then, holy buster bars at Dairy Queen, she totally gets what the big deal is and why Cece likes to invoke that word so much.  
  
Because, well, it’s when he pushes her back against the wall and her bare shoulder blade hits the exposed brick that he slides his thigh between her legs, and  _okayyyyyy_ , there are three things she can’t stop in this moment:  
  
First -- the incessant looping track in her brain that is saying,  _you are not wearing any underwear, you are not wearing any underwear, you are not wearing any underwear_ , in a weird robot-voice;  
  
Second -- the weird little hiccup of a moan-slash-gasp that leaves her mouth and kinda enters his since his mouth is basically  _right_  there; and  
  
Third -- that she actually grinds down a little against his thigh, which in turn makes him buck against her a little, which totally just makes her grind down that much harder, and they’re not even really kissing anymore, just, like, sharing the same oxygen, and it’s bizarre and kinda makes her want to just do it right there, in the hall, near the bathroom and her bedroom, but it’s also totally terrifying for exactly that same reason, and now they’re not even moving against each other but staring each other in the face (kinda cross-eyed because their faces are still all smushed way too close), and she hears herself say, “oh,” and even to her it sounds so quiet and innocent.   
  
Which is maybe why she finally pulls back from him a little, and his thigh is still right there between her legs, and all in one breath she hears herself say: “I’m not wearing any underwear I’m going to go to bed now.” And Nick does that thing where he sort of purses his lips and scrunches his face in a serious way and he just nods once, like, Awesome Idea, Jess, Get Out Of Here With Your Exposed Lady Bits Pressed Against My Dry-Clean Only Suit, Let’s Do What Is Best For The Sake Of Friendship And Not Fornication.   
  
So, you know. She does that. She goes to bed and makes sure the door shuts behind her, and stays shut.   
  
It does.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
She wakes up the next morning with determination beating loud in her heart that Things Will Not Be Awkward.   
  
She steps out into the kitchen with the same bold determination, and finds the apartment mostly empty. Save for Nick.  
  
“Where is everyone?” she asks, her voice still creaky with sleep. Nick looks up, his face all alarmed like she just got him red-handed at something but all he’s doing is spooning Cheerios into his mouth and reading the Sunday sports page. Still, he stands there, his spoon dripping all over the paper, raised halfway up to his mouth.  
  
“Uhhhh,” he starts, and then he collects himself, or whatever it is he thinks he’s slyly doing. Because he drops the spoon down into the bowl, looks down at it, and when he looks up at her again he looks as normal as Nick always looks (vaguely disgruntled and disheveled, slightly surprised that he is having the conversation that he is having, like everything she says has an aspect of the surreal to it). He rubs at the back of his neck as he says, “Gretchen just left, so that means Schmidt will be shame-sleeping most of the day, and Winston just took off for a pick-up game . . . that I am late to meet him for.”  
  
She approaches the kitchen counter he is standing behind slowly. “Ahh, some b-ball. Gonna shoot some hoops. Slam some dunks.”  
  
“Yeah something like that we’re all right, right, we’re all right?” He says it all in one breath, and it’s her turn to look caught off kilter, because she was _pretty_  sure it was gonna have to be her that broached this subject (they were making out last night! like, a couple of yards away from where she is standing now! that's crazy!).  
  
“Sure,” she shrugs. “I mean, do we need to talk about it? Was that . . . something people talk about?”  
  
He shakes his head deliberately, and kinda dizzyingly.   
  
“Nah, no, nope. Come on, come on, Jess. I was -- I was druuuuunk, and I was in bad place. Spiritually. And emotionally. And . . . metabolically. We’re cool, man, right?”  
  
“So cool! The coolest! Greased Lightning cool! Cool as ice! Ice! Baby!” She offers a weak fist pump at the end, and Nick frowns.   
  
“Yeah, okay.”  
  
He looks at her quickly before heading out the door, and then pulls the hood of his sweatshirt up over his head as he walks away.   
  
He left his Cheerios behind, but they look pretty soggy, so she just dumps them down the drain and listens as Schmidt moans, “ _whyyyyyyyyy, Schmidt, why_ ,” from behind his bedroom door.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Here’s the thing though, and here’s another Super Dumb Thing Jess does: she can’t stop thinking about It.   
  
It: The Thing They Are Cool With And Don’t Talk About.   
  
It: Making Out In The Hallway Outside Her Bedroom.   
  
In the days and the couple of weeks that follow the wedding, they do play it cool -- or as cool as two people such as themselves are capable of playing it cool. They definitely don’t talk about it and Nick definitely doesn’t randomly start kissing her all hard and dirty-like, but it’s still . . . strange. Like they’ve crossed some event horizon and whatever bizarre roommate/friend relationship history they shared could be neatly divided in two: Pre-Wedding and Post-Wedding.   
  
The thing is that Jess can’t stop fixating on It (or on him, but that’s a whole other enchilada, senorita).   
  
She keeps thinking about it, in odd little idle moments. She’ll be looking up cupcake recipes on the internet and suddenly start thinking about his thigh between her legs, the wall at her back. She’ll bump into him in the bathroom, his hair still wet from the shower, and as she brushes her teeth she’ll start thinking about how his face wasn’t actually all that soft when it was pressed against her own, that stubble is totally scratchy, and that Spencer must have shaved  _a lot_  because she never remembers feeling like she passed her face over a briar patch after a hefty little makeout sesh, but then again, Spencer never really kissed her like  _that_ , so, well, this analogy has run off its wheels.  
  
And it’s not just her. She is trying really, really hard here to convince herself that she isn’t alone in this Perv Town line of thinking.   
  
Contrary to popular belief, she is not completely clueless. There’s a total difference between having your head in the clouds and not noticing everything happening around you. She can do both! She does do both!  
  
So needless to say, she notices things. And These Things definitely include the way he looks at her.  
  
Like, take for example, the previous Tuesday, the early evening hours of which Jess spent rocking out in the family room to a Tina Turner discography she downloaded and the boys happened to arrive home just at the point where she was belting out “What’s Love Got To Do With It” with the vacuum cleaner as her abandoned dance partner. Winston yelled, “Get it, Tina!” and Schmidt shook his head, but Nick just stood there and was all but openly staring at her, watching her bounce around and sing into a bottle of Boone’s Farm Peach . . . Drink, and boys don’t look at girls like that.   
  
He should not be looking at her like that.  
  
But he does. He does. A lot.  
  
He looks at her like, oh hey, we’re in a fairy tale, and she’s the pretty princess or she’s got the basket and she’s gonna go visit her sick grandma or whatever, but instead of him being the pretty prince or the awesome king or the proud warrior, he’s the monster. He’s the wolf. He looks at her like he’s just gonna gobble her up (he kissed her like he was trying to  _eat her mouth_ ), and she doesn’t know what that says about the both of them that he looks at her like that, and that she kinda likes it.   
  
No. She definitely likes it.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
One of the great perks of having friends like Cece is that Cece knows all the fancy cool places to grab a quick catch-up lunch.   
  
“Let’s say,” she says to Cece, toying at the straw in her water glass until Cece bats her hand away, “I did something kiiiiiinda outside my wheelhouse and something kiiiiiiinda super slutty.”  
  
“Did you get laid?” Cece asks, completely deadpan and judge-y in that way that only Cece can seem to pull off where it doesn’t feel like she’s condemning you but she’s still totally judging you yet somehow on your side.  
  
“No, not quite.”   
  
“There is no ‘not quite,’ Jess. Either you let a dude stick it in, or you didn’t.”  
  
“Wow, okay, I didn’t. He didn’t. There was no . . . sticking. Of things.”  
  
“Who’s the guy?”  
  
“That -- is a secret. Top secret.”  
  
“If it’s Spencer, I swear to god, Jess . . . ”  
  
“What! No! Gross!”  
  
“Gross?”  
  
“You know what I mean.”  
  
“Hardly ever.”  
  
“Was it that mouthbreather who teaches math at that cesspool you work at?”  
  
“You mean the elementary school? And Mr. Glen? No!”  
  
Cece stares at Jess and Jess wonders once more why Cece didn’t pursue a career in CIA-interrogation tactics or whatever Jack Bauer does on TV.  
  
“One of your roommates then. Jess, if you let that Schmidt creature so much as touch you, I am extracting you from your housing situation  _right_  now.”  
  
“It wasn’t that roommate!”  
  
 Cece merely arches an eyebrow.   
  
“You heat-seeking missile, you truth-seeking devil,” Jess marvels. “You sorceress, you are too good.”  
  
Cece shrugs. “The flannel guy then?”  
  
Jess shrugs this time. “Sometimes he cries a lot, so I feel like I understand him on a base, chemistry level.” Jess fidgets with the cocktail napkin in front of her. “But now? It’s like, it’s kinda weird, you know? Because he put his mouth on my mouth and I  _liked_  it, but, you know, it’s cool. We’re just not going to do that . . . mouth-on-mouth thing anymore. Unless I’m dying, I guess, and I need CPR. But I don’t know if he’s certified. I think I’d be willing to let him try though. Putting his mouth on mine. To save my life. Hero stuff.”  
  
“Jess.”  
  
“Or maybe I don’t have to be  _dying_  dying for him to put his mouth on my mouth. I could fake die? Or fake be dying? It could be a test! Tests are educational. And good. And I saw the way he was watching me eat that bagel yesterday morning. No one looks at cream cheese like that. No one.”  
  
“Jess.”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“I mean this in the nicest, sweetest way imaginable: you can be incredibly deluded when it comes to guys. You’re like a Disney chipmunk who thinks that snake in the grass wants to be your best friend, and not swallow you whole and spit your bones out.”  
  
“Graphic.”  
  
“Spencer hurt you bad, babe. And I am glad -- I am so, so glad -- you are casting your line out there and seeing what other fish are out there in the sea -- blah, blah, metaphors. But listen here and listen good: I do not want that flannel-wearing crybaby you live with hurting you, too.” Cece leans back away from Jess and picks up her appletini. “So be smart. Be safe. And use a condom.”  
  
“I never said anything about . . . the in-and-out stuff.”  
  
“You have got to stop referring to sex that way.”  
  
Jess pulls her mouth into a small moue.  
  
“You really think I’m a Disney chipmunk and Nick is going to eat my bones?”  
  
Cece swallows a sip of her drink. “No. I said he’d spit them out.” Cece’s gaze slants a bit more critical.  
  
“And I do not know what you’re smiling about.”  
  
Jess shrugs.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Another installment in the Super Dumb Things Jess Does In The Post-Spencer Era definitely includes this:  
  
Getting extra hammered at a faculty fall outing. There was a hayride, and a lot of leaves, and definitely no schoolchildren, and she thinks that it was on her third cup of cider that she realized that it was most certainly spiked.   
  
Yeah.  
  
But that’s not even close to being as dumb as the Super Dumb Thing Jess Does.  
  
So. She realizes the cider is most certainly spiked, but that doesn’t mean she stopped drinking it.  
  
It sure doesn’t mean that.  
  
Which is why, and how, at around a quarter to eleven she winds up calling Nick, who after hearing Jess sing-song slur a whole lot of f-words (“ . . . fall festival, friend-o, full of freaky . . . fangs . . . fun . . . festivie . . . festities . . . festy testes . . . ”), immediately passes the phone off to Schmidt (“you owe us, man; you owe all of us for a great many things”), who in turn cabs his way out to The Haunted Hay Barn/Forest Thing/Whatever (his words to his cab driver) only to grab Jess by the elbow, pluck a couple errant pieces of hay out of her hair and drive them back home. In her car.  
  
“Treat her gently, she is a lady,” she tells him, waggling a finger way too close to his face.   
  
“I know how to drive a lady to where we wanna be headed -- you know what I mean? Heh. You  _know_  what I mean.”  
  
“You make me want to vomit.”  
  
Schmidt shrugs. “It’s your car. It’s a free country, baby!”  
  
By the time they pull up in front of the apartment, she’s sobered up some, and Schmidt has hereby banned Jess from ever singing any ABBA song ever again, so long as they both shall live.   
  
Jess frowns as Schmidt kills the ignition.  
  
“Why didn’t Nick come get me?” she asks.  
  
“Oh, fine. I see how it is. I  _see_  how it is. You got an order of preference when it comes to the three of us, huh? And I’m not on top? I’m not on top? Who’s on top? I’m not on top?”  
  
She shakes her head energetically. That was  _so_  not what she meant. “That’s not what I meant,” she says, but she still sounds kinda drunk. And whiny. “I meant, I called him. Because . . . I assumed. You. Were out. With a bevy of ladies. A whole . . . bevy of them.”  
  
“Yeah, nice save, Lightweight.”  
  
She points the finger-guns at him because that’s just what they do (or, well, she does) when she’s not sure what else to say to this bro, and then hops (read: stumbles) out of the car.  
  
She takes the stairs two-at-a-time, because all that cider has totally caught up with her (“I need to see a man about a horse,” she calls to Winston as she power-walks into the apartment), but even as she approaches the bathroom, she can hear the shower running.  
  
And, okay. She can do math. She has three roommates. One was down in the car with her and his name is Schmidt, one was standing in the kitchen and his name is Winston, so that totally leaves one possible option as to who the man behind the curtain is: Nick.   
  
She’s not even pissed at him, but she’s operating on Drunk Logic, and with Drunk Logic, EVERYTHING MAKES TOTAL SENSE! EVERYTHING IS THE FUNNIEST AND THE GREATEST! (except for when it’s not and it’s the worst and the most depressing). So she starts tiptoeing. Outside of the bathroom she is tiptoeing, because she now has a grand scheme (using Drunk Logic) that it would just be  _hi_ -larious to totally bust into the bathroom, rip open the shower curtain, and yell --  
  
Boo?  
  
Gotcha?  
  
You just got punk’d, mister!  
  
She hasn’t really made it that far. But she has made it to the bathroom door. And, okay, in a month or maybe just tomorrow morning, she is going to look back on this moment the same way she looks back on that time she showed up to see Spencer in nothing but a trench coat, and she will tell herself: Jess! Why! Did you not! Notice! ALL THE SIGNS?!?  
  
Because spoiler alert: she totally didn’t notice any of the signs.  
  
The signs she should have noticed include: a) Nick’s kinda super loud breathing (like the shower is noisy enough, but the fact that she was able to hear him breathing all raspy over top of that is  _evidence_  that dude was breathing hard! strenuous activity! she didn’t do enough math!); b) that weird catch in his super loud breathing; c) that his hand was curling over the shower rod and grasping all white knuckled at the top of the shower curtain.   
  
Anyway. In this moment and not in a month or even just tomorrow morning:  
  
Ignorant of any and all of these signs, still drunk and with her mouth tasting like a bastardized, fermenting apple orchard, she takes that final step forward and grabs at the slightly mildewing shower curtain.  
  
And she yanks it open.  
  
Of all the potential things she considered that a person or a man might be doing in the shower (washing his armpits with her jasmine soap, doing the Macaulay Culkin from  _Home Alone_  thing with aftershave slapped on his cheeks, pulling a Ferris Bueller with some shampoo and a mohawk, sampling the Beatles catalog and how it matches the bathroom acoustics, etc.) she totally forgot about this possibility.  
  
She yanks open the shower curtain, and as she shouts “Gotcha surprise punk!” she is met with an eyeful. Of Nick.   
  
With his dick in his hand. With his dick in his hand that is moving most aggressively over said aforementioned dick.  
  
For the slow (such as Jess), a brief summation: she has just walked in on The Roommate With Which She Suffers Repressed Sexual Chemistry With Whacking It. Jerking It. Playing The Piper. Throttling The One-Eyed Snake. Wanking, If We Were In Britain.   
  
And okay. Wow.  
  
It’s just, well. Spencer had been hairless, like one of those hypoallergenic cats that don’t make people sneeze (but instead make people wrinkle their noses all “ew, are you for real with that thing?!” because hairless cats are kinda gross, like there are never youtube videos of a hairless kitten playing around being cute but that’s because it’s a documented and actual fact that hairless kittens cannot be cute; she’s thought about this -- a lot), but Nick is kinda the opposite of that except not really. He’s not Alec Baldwin. Or a bear. She doesn’t think he’s a bear. She also doesn’t think she entirely understands what the term  _bear_  means when Schmidt says it and laughs, but she is pretty sure that she doesn’t think Nick is one of those. But he’s got muscles where she didn’t think he did (had she really thought about this? okay yeah she had thought about this), and his back kinda ripples under the shower spray, and he’s no longer holding onto the shower rod, but instead has his, er, free hand braced against the wall of the shower, his body slightly bent, but not like that really hides much of anything.   
  
They’re both just staring at each other, only his hand hasn’t stopped moving. And she’s not sure if it was all that apple cider she drank ( _this is so not for the kiddies, I reckon_ , she had told the farmer bartender man who definitely did not look like Nick, and she’s not sure when she started thinking that all bartenders are Nicks or Nick is all bartenders), or if it’s because she has literally (okay, not literally) been thinking about Nick in Contexts Like These ever since that stupid wedding with those stupid people she didn’t even know, but it’s like she cannot stop staring. She can’t stop looking at him! And she still has the shower curtain in her hand and she’s getting slightly misted by the shower spray, but that doesn’t seem to matter, and it also doesn’t seem to matter that this is a huge gaffe in roommate etiquette, because the only things that feel like they matter in this moment is that she is staring at him and he is staring back at her and he has not stopped moving his hand.  
  
His mouth gapes open a little, and she can’t stop looking at his stupid, stupid face. Or the way the muscles around his collarbone are all super tense and keep flexing with every movement of his fist, or how there are these veins sticking out of his forearms like he’s all Hulked out or something, and and and she can remember what it felt like to have him pressed against him, she can remember what it felt like to have his dick hard and pressed against her, but seeing it, seeing it, him, whatever! in this context is just . . . to reiterate: wow.  
  
“Jess,” he finally says. He grits it out from between his teeth, and she’s still staring at him, and even though his eyes keep flickering shut he’s staring at her, too. She wants to ask him if her name said that way means that she should leave or if it’s an invitation for her to stay -- or if it’s neither, that he always just says her name when he’s jacking off (but, let’s be real: that feels too vain and self-important of a thought even for her to handle).   
  
She doesn’t say anything though. She stands there with her dry mouth and her palms all sweaty, and he says her name again, more plaintively and wanting than before and it settles in her gut, in a way that makes her sway on her feet that has nothing to do with the cider and nothing to do with the near claustrophobic humid heat of the bathroom. Her name isn’t supposed to stretch like that. It’s not supposed to sound like that, least of all from him.  
  
He doesn’t say her name a third time. He’s coming then, his body trembling with it, these quiet little hiccups of broken sound leaving his throat, drowned out by the beat of the shower. He’s not looking at her now, his chin tucked to his chest, eyes screwed shut -- like looking at her would be too much. Like they haven’t already tripped that light fantastic and already done too much.   
  
She kinda gets it though. He can’t look at her right now the same way she can’t look at his fist.  
  
She takes a shuddering breath that he seems to echo, and she thinks he is about to say her name (again), but instead he says:  _Jesus_. He says it quietly, in defeat, or maybe not, because after he says it, he raises his head and he looks at her -- his eyes dark and they linger on her as he looks her up and down, like he’s sizing her up (and all she can think of is Cece, all she can think of is him gnawing on her bones, going all Red and The Wolf on her, and she is pretty sure she’s not supposed to want that as much as she does).  
  
Her heart hammering, she does the easiest thing: she retreats.  
  
“Sorry!” she squeaks.  
  
She wrenches the shower curtain closed as she shouts, “Boundaries! Right! Boundaries!” and then more or less stumbles her way out of the bathroom and down the hall to her bedroom.  
  
She still does have to pee. But she’s thinking that’s gonna have to wait.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
If things were awkward before, the awkwardness between them becomes that much more compounded in the aftermath of Whatever That Was.  
  
There are several reasons why this all becomes Extra Awkward, chief among which would probably be that Nick Was Naked, but also adding a whole lot of new flavor to the Awkward Stew is that they don’t even talk about this.  
  
They don’t talk about it.  
  
The next couple of days they barely even speak to each other, and she can’t even bring herself to make eye contact with him without blushing all the way down to her toes (she also can’t seem to bring herself to drink apple-flavored  _anything_ , but that has more to do with the epic hangover she incurred the following day than the wild flush of embarrassment that accompanies anything remotely reminding her of That Night).   
  
They don’t talk about this though. Any of it. It’s as though as of late all they seem to do with one another is something gloriously out of line and then spend a week or so trying to backtrack with lame excuses and promises that It Didn’t Mean Anything, and It Most Certainly Will Not Happen Again. It’s like all they do anymore is apologize about everything they might have done to one another, so this? This one? Just goes completely uncommented on.  
  
But just because they don’t talk about it doesn’t mean she doesn’t think about it.  
  
Because she does. Think about it.  
  
She thinks about him.   
  
Phrased that way, the whole thing is even more ridiculous.  
  
(She can’t stop thinking about  _him_ ).  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Within two weeks, things are Back To Normal (whatever their subjective calibration of normal is), which is of course when things hit Critical Mass.  
  
Two weeks after The Second Incident, Nick finds out that Caroline has moved in with her new boyfriend.  
  
His reaction isn’t as bad as Schmidt and Winston feared, but it’s also definitely certainly not good.  
  
“I’m fine!” he keeps saying, but it’s all high-pitched and terrified-sounding. “I’m fine!” Which she gets totally means that he is not in fact actually fine at all, so she sits with him at this dingy hole-in-the-wall bar that isn’t his.  
  
(“My bar -- ”  
  
“It’s not your bar, bro,” Winston interrupts.  
  
“MY BAR is at least a little upscale!”  
  
“Like Applebee’s,” Winston adds. “Like a Chili’s fused with a Ruby Tuesday’s.”)  
  
And Jess kinda gets it. Caroline has moved in with her boyfriend, which is Serious, and Jess could commiserate. Like, if Spencer moved into Rachelle the Mermaid’s Seaweed Castle or into her Pineapple Under The Sea, she’d be wigging too.  
  
He makes her drink whiskey with him. “None of that . . . pink, fruity shit. Come on, Jess. This is a night of masculine moping. I need you on my team. I need you downing the stronger stuff.”  
  
So she does that. She makes a  _blech_  face with each sip of the whiskey and Coke he orders for her, but by the end of the night she is pounding shots right along with him, her arm draped heavy over his shoulders as they remind each other over and over again that they’re friends, right?  
  
They’re friends.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
They’re friends until they get home.  
  
They get home at two in the morning, and they both are drunk, like stupid drunk, but not puking-my-guts-out-and-waking-up-in-said-puke drunk.  
  
Winston left earlier, and is either asleep or simply barricaded in his bedroom by the time they get home. Schmidt brought a lady friend back to the Small Room, the rest of which is self-explanatory.  
  
Jess has had a lot of whiskey though. A. Lot. And so has Nick. So she’s not entirely sure what starts the bicker fest (she wants to say Caroline, but Caroline is sort of an easy target when it comes to seeking out blame for all Nick-Related Angst & Things), she just knows that by the time they are in the kitchen and Nick is trying to fill up a glass of water, she’s jabbing a finger against his chest, stealing the glass of water from him, and lecturing him on the merits of Simon & Garfunkel cover bands (“I think everyone should get the opportunity to try and make me cry by singing ‘Sound of Silence,’ okay, bro? This is America! Civil rights. Freedom of speech. And song. And tears. For such a sad man, you sure don’t want to let other people cry. Do you have a monopoly on tears? Is that it, sad man?”). He’s doing that Nick Thing where he shakes his head and starts interrupting and his voice is all scratchy and kinda high, but also quiet, because the apartment is dark and everyone who lives with them is either sleeping or fornicating, and they really shouldn’t interrupt either activity.   
  
“I am not a sad man!” he argues. And then he won’t stop arguing. He’s also insulting Simon & Garfunkel and she doesn’t really think she can stand for that, so she puts down the water glass and does the one thing that seems right in this moment: she smashes her mouth against his mouth to get him to Just Stop Talking For A Minute.  
  
He makes a noise of surprise, and his hands are hovering over her hips but not touching her, not yet.   
  
This installment in the list of Super Dumb Things Jess Does In The Post-Spencer Era is called: The Time They Fuck In The Kitchen At 2 AM.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
He’s not touching her, but then again, she’s not touching him either. Besides her mouth on his mouth. And her chest pressed against his. But her arms are rigid at her side, pushed back away from her body like she’s trying to impersonate a penguin while kissing him, and his hands are hovering just over his hips and his mouth is closed and still against her own, and as far as kisses go this one is not only awkward but not all that great.   
  
She pulls back from him, and the action causes her bare forearm to brush against his open hand. She shrugs a little as she says, “You wouldn’t stop talking,” as though that’s the only reason two people ever kiss each other.  
  
Nick’s expression is amused, but also something else, something that reminds her too much of the shower and the way he had looked at her then. “Not a bad tactic,” he says quietly.  
  
She nods. His hand is now wrapped around her bare forearm, and for such a seemingly innocuous touch she’s got a whole lot of things working themselves out inside of her. Or maybe not so much working themselves, but igniting themselves and making it feel like it’s hard to breathe.  
  
“Kinda a diversionary thing,” she starts explaining rapidly, “you know, engage the mouth in other activities and you can’t -- ”  
  
Nick kisses her then, one hand still gripping her wrist and his other hand cupping her jaw too tight. He kisses her  _way_  differently than how she kissed him to shut him up a minute before. This kiss is all open and wet, and her lips part for his near immediately and his tongue feels thick inside her mouth.  
  
He lets go of her wrist and drags her body against his, and she throws an arm around his neck, grabs at his chest. They’re kissing noisily, hungrily, and it’s just like that night after the wedding except for how it isn’t: there’s a confidence here on both their part that was absent before; there’s a sureness that they both want this, and more than that, a shared knowledge that they both will have it. It, each other, whatever.  
  
He keeps pulling at her hair, and her hips keep knocking against his. His mouth smears past hers and under her jaw, her hand under the collar of his shirt, and she can’t stop making these breathy little noises that Nick seems to appreciate because he groans softly against her throat. He bites her gently, and they’re basically grinding against each other, and Jess doesn’t even bother trying to stop the moan that escapes her, so she moans again.   
  
The sound of her voice breaks whatever weird reverie the two of them were sharing because they both freeze against each other. Her fingers bite into the jut of muscle that extends from neck to shoulder and she catches the way he shivers a little at that, and then he’s pulling himself up to full height and looking down at her face.  
  
“You gotta be quiet,” he says, all breathless, and it is  _bonkers_  her reaction to him saying that, because she swallows hard and can feel herself clench between her legs. She thinks he notices because his eyes go kinda glazed and he says it again: “You gotta be quiet.”  
  
“I’m quiet,” she whispers as indignantly as she can, and his mouth quirks upwards slightly.  
  
And then he spins her body around.   
  
He bends her over the counter, and the edge of it bites into her stomach, just below her diaphragm and it’s super uncomfortable, but he’s already got her skirt flipped up over his ass and he’s, like, rubbing her through her panties and her cheeks feel all flushed and red and hot and if she lays her face against the countertop the cool contrast is kinda neat. Her hands are sweaty and they stick to the countertop as she braces herself and she bites her bottom lip hard when he pulls the leg of her underwear to the side and then he is touching her. He’s touching her and saying her name, all reverently, but also so filthy, and she shifts her weight as he slides first one finger inside of her, and then another. All she can hear is the thudding of her heart and the way she is panting loudly. And just as quickly as it started, she’s left empty and wanting more, but there’s the metallic clunk of a belt come undone, and her pulse is basically through the roof at this point.  
  
“I don’t,” he starts, and then, “Fuck, I don’t have -- anything. Are you? I mean, I am. Clean.”  
  
It takes her a full beat to even figure out what he’s talking about. She’s bent over the same counter where they both sat eating bagels and arguing about whose turn it was to take the garbage out like 16 hours ago and he’s asking her if . . . oh. Right.  
  
“I’m good,” she says, the sound muffled by her forearm, her mouth pressed wet against it. “I’m good, it’s good, you’re good, just --  _come on_.”  
  
If he laughs at her, she doesn’t hear it. He presses a hand flat against her back, and then he’s pressing inside of her.  
  
Her hair keeps spilling over her face, and she can dimly hear Nick muttering under his breath, and oh god, of all the things she had previously considered about Nick (In Situations Like These) she really had not thought of him as being a talker during sex, but speaking of shutting up, He Will Not Shut Up. He keeps murmuring her name and the word  _fuck_  (“fuck, Jess, Jess, fuck”), and he keeps saying Things People Say In Porno Films (She Thinks), only they don’t sound as cheesy as she thought they would (if she has indeed thought about this) (she has), but instead sound incredibly earnest and like he is basically as out of his mind in this moment as she is.   
  
She’s trying to stay quiet, but it’s hard. It’s like she’s totally overwhelmed by how dirty and vulgar what they’re doing is (Winston will eat his Wheaties at this counter in like five hours! Schmidt will make his yogurt parfaits here!), and also,  _holy shit_ , Nick isn’t holding anything back. Each thrust is rough and hard and jars her that much more against the countertop and kinda knocks the wind out of her, but she likes it?   
  
She likes it. And she’s dimly aware of how different . . .  _this_  is from all the times she and Spencer had sex. It’s not that Spencer was bad in bed (he was okay, let’s be real), but there was never this spark of impulse, and he never talked to her the way Nick is right now (it’s like he can’t stop marveling over how wet she is, and each time he mentions it, it makes her short-circuit a little); Spencer never moved her around like she was weightless, never fucked her like he was just as desperate for her to come as he was himself.  
  
Which is maybe why she can’t take it anymore and sort of sobs Nick’s name. His rhythm falters a little, and when he slams into her again she can feel his body flush against her back, feel his teeth against the back of her neck, and she can’t stop whimpering.  
  
“You gotta be quiet,” Nick says again, and she’s trying, dude, she’s really trying here, but she’s kinda beside herself right now, and her knees are already shaking and she hasn’t even come yet, but she can hear herself repeating over and over again, “oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,” like she’s a broken record or a severely played out record or a record that’s about to self-combust under the needle or what even is this metaphor, “oh my god.”  
  
He doesn’t even bother telling her to be quiet again, but he clamps a hand over her mouth, and when she comes, she comes biting the center of his palm.  
  
He comes shortly after, his face buried in her hair just behind her ear, and  _wow_.  
  
This is definitely The Dumbest of The Super Dumb Things Jess Has Done.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
She wakes up the next day sore between her legs and sore just under her ribcage, and that’s not even touching the raging hangover trying to burst forth from behind her eyes.   
  
When she reaches the bathroom, she finds it empty, and she enjoys about thirty seconds of quiet peace as she brushes her teeth until the door opens.  
  
And, it’s Nick.  
  
Her eyes go wide in the reflection in the mirror and she freezes with her toothbrush hanging out of her mouth. To be fair, he freezes at the door and just stares at her and she stares at his reflection in the mirror, and they really need to stop staring at each other.   
  
He finally moves and steps into the bathroom and grumbles what sounds like, “Good morning,” she spits a huge wad of toothpaste into the sink but she can’t seem to shake the deer in the headlights look she’s rocking.   
  
“Hiiiiiiiiiii,” she finally says.  
  
Nick’s face is sort of inscrutable, which is rare with him, as he looks at her.  
  
“This is awkward,” he says, and she smiles small.  
  
“This is awkward,” she says.  
  
“Yeah, so. This can’t -- this can’t be a thing,” he says, and okay, so this is going to be That Conversation. “This is probably definitely so not a thing that is allowed to happen anymore. That was, like, a one-time deal. That was me rebounding.” The way he says it makes her think he isn’t insulting her even though everything she has ever seen in rom-com land and everything Cece has ever told her, rebounding and being called someone’s rebound is bad news bears. But she’s going to roll with this. She can be his rebound, and he can be her rebound, and they can go back to being normal roommates who do normal roommate things that definitely don’t include the sex stuff.  
  
  “And me rebounding! I never got my Spencer rebound sex!” she whines, but then she brightens. “It’s a double rebound! Like a double rainbow!”  
  
“Sure, Jess. It was a double rainbow. It was a one-time double rainbow.”  
  
She sticks her toothbrush back in her mouth and swishes it around a few times considering what he just said. She spits.  
  
“They are pretty rare, you know,” she says.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Two or three weeks pass where Absolutely Nothing Of Interest happens. That, is, between them.  
  
Jess thinks though that maybe she has seen too many Billy Crystal rom-coms (or maybe just the one) but she thought that the immediate wake of Them Doing It (In The Kitchen) would be that whatever crazy sexual tension they had built between the both of them would have dissipated.   
  
Like, they would have literally banged the tension out of each other and they could go back to some semblance of Normal, where he watched a lot of baseball and bought a lot of German beer and talked about whatever weird news tidbits he had picked up over the day.  
  
(“You bring up the debt crisis again, I am walking out that door,” Schmidt would say. “I don’t know who this DOW Jones character is, but I really don’t want to hear about how he’s gotta get it up.”  
  
“You know what the DOW Jones is,” Nick would deadpan.  
  
“That may be, but my point still stands.”)  
  
And yeah, they sort of go back to normal, in that she practices her biology puppet show for him (“ . . . Mr. Intestines is kinda gnarly-looking. Like overcooked sausage links,” Nick said) and they share pepperoni Hot Pockets for dinner and she swings by the bar while he’s working and he mixes her different weird cocktails he’s still trying to learn how to accurately and tastily make -- but it’s still strange.  
  
Like they have one of those  _Fantasia_  dancing elephants in the corner they’re pretending isn’t there.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
They ignore the dancing elephants for awhile.   
  
They ignore them until it’s three AM on a Saturday night and he just got home from work and she’s all sprawled out on the couch with all these empty energy drinks around her (real talk: she didn’t  _know_  they were Winston’s energy drinks and thought they were just awesomely flavored fruity juice boxes. So she drank them all).  _Homeward Bound_  is playing quietly on the (crooked) TV.  
  
He collapses next to her and sighs heavily. She’s lounging there, completely hyped up, and he’s just looking at her in that way he does, like he’s a Looney Tunes cartoon character, all bug-eyed, so she looks right back at him with the same expression and resumes rambling about  _Milo and Otis_  or Amish country or Tom Hanks’s filmography or whatever she was talking about in the first place.   
  
She flails backwards into the cushions on the couch, and her left leg falls across his lap. She can feel the caffeine-crash coming on and she doesn’t move, but he doesn’t move her leg either.   
  
“What are you  _talking_  about?” he finally interrupts.  
  
“I don’t knowwww,” she whines. She tires of her own voice eventually (“ . . . make a note, buddy; this right here is a rarity”) and they both just lull into a mutual silence. It’s the first time in a long while that the two of them have just quietly coexisted. Neither of them is rambling to fill the silence, and they’re just sitting there -- alone, together. There is still that tension, taut between the both of them, but she’s trying really hard to focus on the talking animals on the television screen.  
  
They sit there in silence watching the last half of  _Homeward Bound_  and she’s sort of drifting off until she feels his hand close hot over her ankle. His thumb passes over the bone that juts there, and when she glances over at him, he isn’t looking at her, but blankly staring at the television screen. He exerts more pressure against her ankle, and then his hand starts climbing higher, inching slowly up her leg, and she is so, so, super glad she decided to shave her legs earlier that day.  
  
His hand rests against her knee, and she doesn’t really mean to, but her legs part, and he smirks down at her.  
  
“Nice boxers,” he grumbles, and she looks down at the shorts and the snowmen wearing Santa hats that decorate them.  
  
“Thanks,” she says, just as quietly, and she crosses her arms over her stomach. “I bought them for Christmastime,” she tells him, wholly and completely serious.  
  
“It’s October,” he says, still in that quiet, gravely voice, and whoa buddy, that’s his sex voice, isn’t it? It totally is. And she hates to give him credit, but it is totally working: she’s already trying not to squirm as his hand drags up her thigh and then he stops, his fingers toying with the hem of her ridiculous Christmas boxer shorts.   
  
He’s leaning over her now, his weight braced on the hand that’s not on her knees, and she looks up into his face. “I like December better,” she says, as if that makes any kind of sense at all.  
  
He purses his lips and nods just once. He tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, and then he kisses her. He kisses her slow this time, different than the other times. It’s a lazy kind of kiss, the sort of thing that promises All The Time In The World, exploratory and thorough. She cants her hips up to him, like her hips are operating of their own accord, and Nick uses the moment to drag her shorts and her panties down to bunch just above her knees. He’s breathing hard now, and so is she, and the animals are still lost and talking on the television, but that seems super far away.  
  
He doesn’t stop kissing her. He doesn’t stop kissing her when he worms a hand down between their bodies and presses his hand against her, cupping her, making her grind down against him, and whatever noise she would have made is muffled by his open mouth.  
  
His fingers feel huge inside of her, and he keeps saying, “ _yeah_ ,” against her mouth, and she’s, like, making mewling noises; she sounds like that cat on the TV if the cat didn’t talk people-language and instead was talking cat-language.  
  
She hears herself say his name, all quiet and in a voice that doesn’t even sound like her own, but it makes him groan, and she’s kinda blown away by how way more intimate this feels than when they did it in the kitchen.  
  
She’s between this thought and absolutely no thought at all, so close to coming, when Nick suddenly stills.  
  
The door to Schmidt’s room opens with a kick and a grumbled expletive. Nick rears back from her quickly and throws the afghan Winston’s grandma knit for him over her body.   
  
“Hey, bro-inski,” Schmidt calls over to him. “You home?”  
  
“Does it look like I’m home?”  
  
“Touche, amigo.” Schmidt stops and stares at the TV. “You watching  _Homeward Bound_ , man?”  
  
“Hi, Schmidt,” Jess calls from the couch and raises her hand to wave. Schmidt nods like everything makes sense now, and patters off to the bathroom, muttering about how he’d gladly join them but he doesn’t feel like crying tonight, thanks so much.  
  
Jess pulls her Christmas shorts on underneath the blanket.  
  
Nick licks his fingers.  
  
Wow, she is in so much trouble here.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Okay, so here’s the problem and the problem she should have divined from the beginning:  
  
This  
  
Keeps  
  
Happening.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
A few days after The Aborted Couch Make-Out Session, they’re back on the couch in the middle of the afternoon, Nick’s hours at the bar that night and Jess’s students let out at lunch.  
  
They’re back on the couch, and instead of taking the half of a peanut butter sandwich she offered him, he kissed her instead. And she kissed him back. We’ve reached the point in succession of Super Dumb Things Jess Does In The Post-Spencer Era where it is no longer a surprise that she kisses him back when he kisses her.   
  
“We don’t talk about this,” Nick pants, bats her hands out of the way so he can undo his belt faster. “No talking about this to Winston. Definitely no talking about this to Schmidt.”  
  
“Because of The Roommate Dynamic,” she says in agreement, and Nick just says, “yeah, yeah, yeah,” all fast in a row, because he’s got his jeans open now, and her hand is still on his thigh but it’s also super close to his dick now, all exposed and hard, and the proximity alone seems to be enough to get Nick all desperate and needy.  
  
The Roommate Dynamic: the grand excuse for why they aren’t allowed to talk about this with Schmidt and Winston. If One Roommate sleeps with Another Roommate, the casual Roommate Dynamic is destroyed.   
  
The loophole for all that destruction is just not to mention the fact One Roommate slept with Another Roommate to The Roommates Not Involved In The Intercourse.   
  
So Jess does the obvious thing: she lays some ground rules.  
  
When Schmidt is out refilling his liquor supplies and Winston is in the shower, she sneaks over to Nick’s room and unfurls a sheet of poster board.  
  
A sheet of poster board, with The Rules.  
  
“Whaaaaaat is this?” he says. “What even this this can’t be a thing that we keep in our apartment I don’t even understand Rule 7 why am I sleeping with someone who refers to sex as ‘the dirty business’ WHY DID YOU EVEN MAKE THIS IS THAT GLITTER?!”  
  
“The Rules stand!” she shouts back.  
  
She leaves the poster in his bedroom and marches back to her own. She’s got a lot of glitter to vacuum up.  
  
(“We don’t talk about this,” Nick pants, and Jess agrees, and the carpet is kinda rough on her knees, but that doesn’t seem to matter so much when she slides her mouth around the head of his dick and it’s like he’s laughing and moaning at the same time).  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
It. Keeps. Happening.  
  
She jerks him off in the bathroom early one morning before she has to go in for class, but then Winston walks in all bleary-eyed so they spring apart, leaving Nick to try and hide a  _pretty_  impressive boner against the sink.  
  
He goes down on her one the couch while  _So You Think You Can Dance_  is on the TV, and it’s not like Spencer never did this for her (he wasn’t that big of a turd), but wow, he definitely never applied himself with this level of enthusiasm. Nick hauls her up by the hips against his face, his forearm laid over her lower abdomen to stop her from bucking and squirming, and if that’s not the hottest thing that has ever happened to her, she’s not entirely sure what is.   
  
There’s the time they totally bang at the bar where he works, back in the storeroom, her ass precariously balanced on a crate of cheap wine.  
 There’s the time or two or seven they do it on the couch (that poor couch; it’s witnessed too much).  
  
There’s the time in her car when her elbow hit the horn and she bruised her knee on the console-thing-whatever.  
  
And yeah. There’s the time they do it in Schmidt’s room.  
  
Whatever.  
  
He deserved it.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Okay, maybe he didn’t  _deserve it_  deserve it.  
  
But yet again, Schmidt drank the last of Nick’s soy milk (“I buy it special! Special as in FOR ME!”), and she doesn’t know: she guesses that’s impetus enough to get nasty in his bedroom. That, and she totally caught him stealing money out of the Douchebag Jar.  
  
“The small room really is small,” she says. She shuts the door behind her, which seems sort of like an unnecessary gesture.  
  
“Can’t believe he came back here,” Nick says.   
  
She’s not sure if it’s the illicit nature of what they’re doing (sex on Schmidt’s bed! what!) or just that she really, really,  _really_  wants to be having sex with Nick right now, but she is crazy turned on, and he seems to be a pretty even match for her, based solely on the way he is grumbling, “Why are you even wearing pants?!” as he tries to get them down past her hips.   
  
Schmidt’s room smells the way those fancy men’s clothing stores smell: kind of sterile, but also really cologne-y. She’s still wearing the bowling alley t-shirt she bought at a Goodwill when she was sixteen and Nick still has that blue and green flannel shirt on, but one of them (her?) unbuttoned it down to his navel, and she can’t stop dragging her hands over all that exposed skin as he lays there under her. Her knees slip against Schmidt’s bedspread and her body bears down on Nick’s hard; he grunts and grabs at her ass, his other hand smoothing up her thigh.  
  
“This bedspread isn’t very conducive for my kneecaps. It’s like a lady’s satin nightgown.”  
  
Nick snorts and his fingers dig in low on her hip, and he keeps saying, “I got you, I got you,” but his voice gets all garbled when she lowers herself down onto him, and she keeps pushing down on his chest with the heels of her palms because, yeahhh, balance is proving a hard thing to hold onto on Schmidt’s Slip-and-Slide bedspread. Nick’s feet keep skidding against the bedspread as he tries to gain some traction against her, and every time he raises his hips against hers, they both slip down the bed a little more.  
  
“Get off,” he finally says, and Jess clumsily pitches off his lap. “Come on,” he says, and he grabs her by the arm while she just looks cluelessly up at him, naked save for the super old bowling t-shirt, and he looks just as ridiculous -- hair all ruffled, his shirt wide open, dick curving up and wet, and ok, _wowwww_. Maybe she’s not staring up at him totally cluelessly but instead whatever the sex variation of shell-shock is.   
  
“Come on,” he repeats, and she moves with him off the bed and lets him draw her down to the floor. He sits down on the super tacky bright green rug Schmidt has laid out and pulls her to him. The carpet is rough against her knees and she’s totally going to have rug-burn in the morning, but it sort of seems worth it the way he’s looking at her all slack-jawed and rubbing the head of his dick against her while he mutters, “We obviously didn’t think the logistics of this one through,” against her collarbone.  
  
She snorts. “Obviously,” because thinking through the logistics of Banging Your Roommate No One Knows You Are Banging In Your  _Other_  Roommate’s Room is totally something you’re supposed to think out before you get all naked and sweaty and twisty together.   
  
Nick tangles a hand at the base of her neck, strands of her hair catching around his fingers, and she braces her hands on his shoulders and okay,  _oh boy_ , he’s inside her again (and like, dude,  _what_ , it’s like no matter how many times they do this (this: the deed, the whole enchilada, the big she-bang, the horizontal tango, etc.) she can’t get used to that immediate push and stretch as he fills her). It sorta burns, but in a good way (definitely not the bad way), and makes her whine a little, her voice all throaty and high-pitched at the same time, and that just makes him sort-of-but-not-really laugh, because he’s kinda groaning, too, and maybe that’s why he bites her, a small nip just below the dip in her throat.   
  
“This,” she pants, “is, so, much, better.”  
  
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he says, each gasp of the word matched with the thrusting of his hips, and that’s pretty great rhythmic-wise.   
  
Her chin bumps against the top of his head and it’s like her hips are moving of their own volition, following whatever tenuous rhythm he’s set for the both of them.   
  
“Kinda loses . . . ” Nick jockeys for more leverage against her as she speaks, and she pauses to screw her eyes shut for a second, because,  _whoa_ , that is deep, dude. Banging him is like getting a crash course in her own anatomy, it’s bonkers, and she can totally feel him smirking against her neck because that’s another thing she’s learned: what it means when his mouth twitches a certain way against her -- when he gets her to lose her composure or he gets her all blabber-y or conversely gets her to shut up, he always smirks, and a smirk is different than a smile. It feels different against her skin.  
  
“Kinda,” she starts again, and she licks her lips, “kinda loses the symbolic appeal when you’re not doing it on the bed, you know.”  
  
Nick stills beneath her, but Jess is still rolling her hips, and then she pauses too, her breath all ragged and winded, like that time she did that hot-room yoga thing with Cece and thought she was going to either die or melt -- melt until she died and there was nothing left but some bone and a gelatinous liquid that was once the artist formerly known as her. If she was to get all super introspective -- and now (read: straddling Nick in Schmidt’s room on Schmidt’s floor with Nick’s sweaty hands all over her) is really not the time for that -- she’d think something along the lines that Nick is a lot like that hot-room yoga, but in person form. As in, he sometimes (and often, as of late at least) makes her feel like a gelatinous liquid that was once the artist formerly known as her.   
  
He flips them then, and her legs splay open unattractively around him, but he grabs her by the thigh, hoists her leg up over his hip and he’s moving again and her back is arching up and she’s pretty sure she couldn’t spell her name right now if you asked her (and Jess is a pretty easy name to spell in the first place).  
  
“I’m okay with it,” he wheezes, and he’s got to be getting way more rug-burn than she was, because she had just been rocking against him before, but he’s, like, full-on fucking her here. He only has two hands, but they feel like they’re  _everywhere_  -- on her hips, spreading her thighs open wider, pulling at her hair, clutching at her neck, pushing her t-shirt up; he groans really, really loud when he realizes she’s not wearing a bra underneath, and then she’s the one groaning because his hands are everywhere.  
  
“Yeah, I’m okay, too,” she says, her agreement several beats too late, and if he has no idea what she’s talking about it, a) wouldn’t be the first time, and b) he doesn’t say anything about it.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
There is always The Turning Point. In these sorts of stories, there always comes a time when the story turns.  
  
We’ve reached that destination.  
  
It’s a weekend, and Winston has traveled up to Chicago to visit Coach.  
  
(“You haven’t seen Coach since you came back from Lithuania?”  
  
“Latvia. And it’s not like Coach has come on down here to visit me either.”)  
  
Schmidt is on Day Three of what will become a seven day relationship and has (as of yet) to leave his new girlfriend’s apartment.  
  
(“Denise’s apartment really speaks to me. As does her bedside drawer full of condoms”).  
  
Maybe it’s the empty apartment, or maybe it’s just natural momentum or inertia or science or whatever, but that night she finds herself in her bedroom, on her bed. With Nick.   
  
Violation of Rule 3(a): no sex in her bedroom.  
  
(Rule 3(b): no sex in his bedroom).  
  
And, you know, she’s kinda getting why this was a rule in the first place. Compared to the other times they have done this (his hand sneaking under her shirt, her hand in his hair, his body pressing hers down with his weight), This Feels Like A Big Deal.  
  
Her room is dark, and they are in her bed, and Nick buries his face in both the crook of her neck, and against her pillows. The floral sheets smell of her and her shampoo and that weird eco-friendly perfume she bought out of that hippie van that one time.  
  
But they are naked! In her bed! And it’s like he is everywhere all at once, and overwhelming feels like too mild a word for it. Like, this is what people do when they are serious people, she thinks. This is what they do when they are serious about one another, and they don’t have poster boards with rules and they don’t fuck exclusively in every single place they can find that isn’t each other’s room.  
  
It’s just that she’s realizing things. She’s realizing that she really likes the way he says her name and she’d like to hear him say it all the time into whatever distant future neither of them can see. She likes that even though he doesn’t understand half the things she does or says he never acts like she’s stupid.  
  
She likes being under him, right now, in this moment.  
  
She likes his body against hers, his body in her bed, his body with hers.  
  
She likes a lot of things, and these days, most of those things seem to be attached to him.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Okay. So yeah. This is A Big Deal.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
And as if she doesn’t have enough on her plate --   
  
(“I haven’t even mentioned the politics going on at the school right now. The playground has gone gangland and Ms. Patrice of Art Class is jockeying for the Vice Principal position.”  
  
“Drama!” Schmidt said.  
  
“No, he tried to slit his wrists with a paper plate and is now at a home for the unwell.”  
  
“Eek,” Winston said) --  
  
Spencer has started reaching out to her.  
  
“Rachelle rode her bike. To greener pastures.”  
  
“Is that a death euphemism?” she asks him.  
  
“No. It’s a she-broke-up-with-me euphemism.”  
  
And well. It’s just a lot at once! She is banging her roommate who she maybe has Feelings for (spoiler alert: she does), and at THE SAME TIME, her ex-boyfriend who definitely cheated on her and definitely did not water her flowers (that’s A Big Deal too) is trying to make grandiose overt romantic gestures.  
  
She does the only wise thing she can think of:  
  
She calls Cece.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
“I . . . have a confession,” Jess tells Cece.  
  
“Hit me.”  
  
“I’ve been sort of kind of definitely sleeping with Nick. For. Awhile. Now.”  
  
“Whyyyyyyyyy.”  
  
“Whyyyyyyyyy?” Cece just stares blankly at Jess. “No, really. Why are you whying me.”  
  
“Because. Jess! You are the worst, the absolute worst, at doing things casually.”  
 “That’s not true!”  
  
“It is true. And it’s not a bad thing! You just, you got a lot of heart, kid.”  
  
“Well, not this time, buddy. Nick is just a thing. A thing I do things with. And and and now. Now, Spencer’s been showing up with balloons and bears and a mariachi band all, ‘oh, Jess, my heart, I want to win you back.’”  
  
“Shut up.”  
  
“I will not.”  
  
“Do you  _want_  him back?”  
  
Jess screws her face up. “I’m supposed to be conflicted, right? I’m supposed to be all DO I WANT NICK? DO I WANT SPENCER?”  
  
“I thought you were casual with Nick.”  
  
“Yeah. Casual. As in formal wear.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Ugh.” Jess lowers her head down to the table. “We had rules!” she whines. “And we broke them. We broke all of them. Well, except the no videotaping rule. But that’s because I don’t trust technology.”  
  
Cece waves her hand as though dismissing most of what Jess just said. “Okay, but are you conflicted?”  
  
Jess raises her head off the table. “ . . . not really?”  
  
And, oh god, she’s telling the truth.  
  
She flags down the waiter.  
  
“I know it’s only noon . . . thirty, but I need you to get me a pink drink that has all the vodka in it. Just, all of it.”  
  
“Make that two,” Cece drawls.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
AN INTERLUDE TO GIVE THE READER SOME PERSPECTIVE:  
  
(As in, Jess Is Not The Only One Confused By These Turn of Sexy Time Events)  
  
“Yo, you seen Jess?” Nick asks Schmidt.  
  
Schmidt freezes in his tracks, mid-way between the kitchen counter and the couch. “Whoa, bro.”  
  
“What?” Nick asks, already resigned.  
  
“You said that in a sexy tone, bro. You said it in a tone that means you want to have sex with that person you’re using the sexy tone on via their name. In your mouth. I know, man. I know. I  _invented_  the sexy tone.”  
  
“You invented it.”  
  
“SSST, my man. Schmi -- ”  
  
“Please don’t finish that acronym.”  
  
“ -- dt’s Super Sexy Tone. Like a dial tone. For those that want to bang.”  
  
“That doesn’t make any sense.”  
  
“Pick on up and I’ll push your buttons.”  
  
“Please stop.”  
  
“You playing Operator for Jess. ‘Yeah, baby girl, Imma connect you.’”  
  
“I am begging you. To stop.”  
  
INTERLUDE OVER.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
So Jess does the one thing Jess thinks she can do:  
  
Jess Gets Brave.  
  
Jess Gets Brave At A Karaoke Bar. After Several Sake Bombs.  
  
She can’t entirely remember what it is she says to Nick (on account of the sake bombs), but she knows that it definitely involves explaining the idea of mutual exclusivity and ecosystems and how this totally isn’t a One Can’t Live While The Other Survives Scenario, and that she could totally be both A Roommate and A Girl he Likes To Do Dirty Things With.  
  
Without all The Rules. And without All The Secrets.  
  
“We’re in public!” he shouts at her over the music.  
  
“Okay, we are!” she shouts back. And then he just looks at, all hangdog and all  _I can’t_ , and he doesn’t even have to say that part, but he does.  
  
He actually says, “I can’t.”  
  
And she gets it, okay. He’s reluctant to make this into anything serious (on account of the Caroline and the whole I Just Got Out Of A Huge Destructive Relationship, and on account of the Caroline).  
  
To that, Jess says, “Alright, well. I am an empowered woman! And I say no to all . . . this!” But the thing is, she says it with these super-wide eyes and a trembling chin, because wow, rejection hurts the second go-round, too, but at least she’s not naked and singing and she wasn’t with him for six years or whatever.  
  
She has what the bartender tells her is a Cosmo but it kinda tastes like lighter fluid even though it’s pink and shiny, and next thing she knows, she’s stepped up on stage and is belting out the Air Supply classic, “All Out of Love.”  
  
She’s pretty sure that elevates whatever weirdness that had just transpired between her and Nick to full on Thwarted Epic Awkwardness.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The awkwardness continues apace.  
  
The go a whole month just being Normal Roommates who do Normal Roommate things. Like pay electric bills and the rent and bicker over whose turn it is to buy more toilet paper and whose turn it actually is to clean the toilet and that kinda thing.  
  
He sometimes looks at her though. He looks at her like he wants to apologize, but she’s been working on this thing called a backbone, so when he looks at her like that she leaves and rides her bike down to the florist on the corner and buys some flowers that are definitely not carnations.  
  
Their apartment is pretty full of flowers these days.  
  
But their commitment to co-existing awkwardly and peacefully only lasts for so long. Much like her flowers.   
  
Their apartment is pretty full of dead flowers these days.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
A random Sunday evening in late November, Jess goes to Nick’s bedroom to ask if the oranges in the fridge are his and if so can she eat one because she’s worried that she might be coming down with scurvy.  
  
She leans against the doorjamb, and he’s just reclining on his bed with a really thick book.   
  
(“Are there dragons in your book?” she had asked him the other day when she saw him with it at the kitchen counter.  
  
“It’s David Foster Wallace,” he had said, not looking up from the page.  
  
“Yeah, okay, but are there dragons?”  
  
He gave her Nick Look #5 (incredulity mixed with judgment and just a little affection) over the book.  
  
“All the best books have a dragon in them,” she told him. “Or an elf. Or a magic sword. Or an evil sorcerer. Or . . .”).  
  
“Yeah, you can have an orange,” he tells her. “I’d hate for you to get scurvy. Especially before you and your band of pirates take to the high seas.”  
  
“Ha ha,” she says. “How’s your book?” she asks him.  
  
“It’s good,” he says. And then.  
  
And then they’re just staring at each other like it’s a month before. It’s like they have a month’s worth of untapped tension mounting between them and he’s looking at her all hungry again, but it’s different. She doesn’t know how, but it’s different this time.   
  
Needless to say, she forgets about the orange.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
His mouth is at the hinge of her jaw and his sheets are really soft, like they’ve been washed a million times, and he meant to place his book on the nightstand next to the bed but he accidentally dropped it on the floor instead.   
  
He’s kissing her then, and she’s kissing him too, they’re equals in this in that sense, and just as they seem to fit together really, really well, she’s fitting a lot of other things together, too.  
  
Things like: she wants more.  
  
She wants more, and she thinks it takes a lot of courage to admit that, and a lot of courage a lot of times can be mistaken as just being super dumb. So maybe all these Super Dumb Things She Has Done In The Post-Spencer Era have actually been Super Brave Things She Has Done.  
  
She pulls back from him and says, “Yeah. I can’t do this.”  
  
Nick gapes at her a little and she leans back on her heels, her knees still pressed against his bare thigh. “I can’t,” she hears herself saying, “I can’t keep doing the dirty stuff if, like, that’s all . . . this is gonna be.”  
  
She can’t really read her face, but he’s looking at her all funny. His eyes are still really dark, the way they get once he gets his hand in her pants or right before he’s about to press his mouth to hers. But he doesn’t move toward her. Instead he looks down at himself and says, “ . . . you couldn’t have told me that before I took my pants off?”  
  
She’s not sure why exactly, but that right there is enough to set her off.  
  
“I’m sorry, Nick. I guess I’m just not ‘cool’ enough for your little ‘No Strings Attached Club.’”  
  
“That’s a lot of air quotes.”  
  
She stands up and hastily brushes her hair off her face. “Your ‘cool’ ‘little’ ‘club’ warrants ‘them.’”  
  
“There’s no club! It’s not a club, Jess! That’s not even how you use air quotes!” He awkwardly slides his pants back up his legs but doesn’t bother with the belt or the button.  
  
“There are strings!” She’s kinda yelling now, but whatever. “There are strings,  _everywhere_! I have strings, man! I am Pinocchio! Pre-makeover, and I like it! I like my strings! So, you can just go ahead and put away your imaginary scissors and stop trying to imaginary snip snip all my awesome strings away because that’s not cool and I’M not cool, so maybe you should go and find yourself a real cool girl who is cool with your scissors and their snipping and everything and you can go be cool together in your cool stringless cool kids’ club!”  
  
“What . . . the fuck,” he says.  
  
“Yeah. That’s what I thought,” she says.  
  
Nick finally stands up, and his jeans are riding super low on his hips, but she’s ignoring that for the time being. He steps right in front of her and it’s not like she can ignore him, proximity and all that.  
  
“The strings? What? What with the strings?” He takes a deep breath and then both his hands on her shoulders and she kinda wants to sway forward into him, but she doesn’t do it. “Okay, Jess. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to be real adults here and we’re going to talk. We’re going to have a real conversation.”  
  
“I thought that’s what we were doing,” she murmurs.  
  
“No more metaphorical strings,” he says quietly. And it’s like how all this started in the first place: she’s thinking about how life is hard and things are hard, and his face is super close to her face, and he is saying her name. He is saying her name like he means it, like he means her (whatever that means), and she’s still not entirely sure what she’s supposed to do with that, but she thinks she should, especially since she just yelled at him when he had his pants off.  
  
His forehead bumps against hers and she can feel as much as hear him say, “You are a real cool girl, you know.”  
  
“No I’m not,” she sort of laughs, because, okay, she may be a lot of awesome great things, but a real cool girl isn’t one of them.  
  
He chuckles. “No, you’re not.”  
  
His lips brush against hers.  
  
“I thought we were going to talk,” she says.  
  
He smiles against her mouth.  
  
“We got time for that,” he says, and Jess is, like, 99% sure (or okay, maybe a conservative 90%) that she’s got him by the metaphorical strings, too, that they’re a regular balanced puppet show here, and, well, hey: that’s a start.  
  
She kisses him this time, and his mouth is still bent in a smile.  
  
Yeah, she’s sure it’s a smile.   
  
His mouth twitches differently against her skin when he smiles.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 _fin._


End file.
